


Mother Machine

by Liljanlaulu



Category: Delain (Band), Original Work
Genre: Agender Character, Asexual Character, Biopunk, Bisexual Character, Body Horror, Dystopia, Gen, Good luck figuring out who's what, Gore, Inspired by Music, Lesbian Character, Music, Original Fiction, POV Alternating, POV First Person, Pansexual Character, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-26
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-20 03:31:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9473498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liljanlaulu/pseuds/Liljanlaulu
Summary: In a city where people live to the never-ending noise of a great machine, a ragtag family one day stumbles upon an anomaly that makes them question everything they know about their home. What is the purpose of the mechanical behemoth that keeps them all alive? Where does it come from? What lies beyond the borders? And when your very humanity is put to the test... how far are you willing to go?(Original canon, but inspired by various Delain songs. Work in progress; Will be updated as it is written. Fair warning: I write extremely slowly.)





	1. Prologue

We live in a city of concrete and steel. If there was a name, it’s been forgotten; We have no need to name it now, because there is nothing else. Only jagged towers and broken bridges, skeletons of structures that have since long fallen apart. The dried husk of a city that might once have held millions of people, but now harbors only the thousands of us.  
Us, and the Machine.  
It's always there, looming on the horizon. It is the heart, but its roots reach through the entire city, woven through the buildings that remain; We live among mazes of shining pipes and tubes, in jungles made of metal.  
We live and breathe its rhythm, the pounding and wailing. Children fall asleep to its beat. It's their lullaby and wake-up call, the background music of all our lives. What is it? Where did it come from? People don't question it anymore; It simply is.  
We live as we can, on every scrap that is left. It is not easy, but it is enough; It has to be. This is what we have, and we fight for it. We, the descendants of however many generations there has been – no one is quite sure – since we were trapped here. There are no walls that shut us in, only miles of dry desert, just as effective. Or perhaps, more; A wall can be razed.  
Most of us have simply accepted it. But some of us dream. We dream, we wonder, we look at the cracked pavement and the grey skies and think:  
_Perhaps one day flowers will grow here again._  


“Like this?”  
“Just like that.”  
I look up from the braid my fingers are weaving of her hair; She proudly holds up a paper flower to me. It's simple, but pretty. Of course, I wouldn't know what any plant looks like more than she does, but there's no need to say so. Not now.  
“What does it say?” I ask instead.  
“It's a dream,” she says, running her finger along a pale petal covered in small, neat writing. “I write down hopes and dreams, wishes, on them. That way we can all remember what we fight for.”  
“That's a wonderful idea, Robin.”  
I smile and she smiles back, grey eyes beaming. Despite the cold color they look so bright, full of life.  
“This time I did think about flowers,” she continues. “I'd like to see a real one someday. I'll find one, for all of us, you'll see. Someday.” Her face settles into a look of determination; For a moment she looks much older than fourteen, even though the spark never leaves her eyes.  
I finish the braid and let my hands drop onto my lap.  
“You will, little bird,” I lie, feeling my heart become heavier than the walls around us. “You will.”  
Someday.


	2. Concrete and Steel

NIGHTINGALE

I wake up to pounding and creaking as I always have. The sounds are accompanied by the deep rumble of thunder in the distance, and cold air drifts in through a window carrying a familiar scent. It’s been raining again.

Aside from the ever-present background noise, it’s quiet inside. The others are still asleep. I don’t want to wake them, but I couldn’t go back to sleep either; I’m suddenly very aware of the lingering chill in the air. So I get up, pulling on some clothes as I reach for a piece of chalk from the pile of supplies that lies haphazardly tucked in a corner - the rainwater ~~~~will have washed away our mark on the outside wall. The damp air seeps into my lungs and brushes against my bare arms, a good kind of cold. The kind that makes you more awake, more alive. Above me the sky is painted over with different shades of grey like a stone wall, made only somewhat lighter by the approaching dawn.

White stripes on the grainy concrete tell me where the mark was and I draw a few quick lines over them. Our mark is a simple feather. The sign for us to find our way back home, and the symbol that tells strangers that the building is ours.

It’ll keep scavengers out, few as they are. Hunters, not so much, but they rarely venture this far, and we can defend ourselves well enough. Our part of the city is hardly crowded, just a few more groups besides ours making their homes in the half-collapsed buildings that litter the inner ring. We have always lived close to the center - dangerously close - even so, it’s safer for us here. Few of the more vicious gangs come here; They keep to the outer city, where there are more people, more supplies, more life. All we really have to worry about are the drones.

Though I haven't seen any for a while, I know they are there – they always are. My eyes scan the ground on instinct for any sign that they’ve been here, finding nothing but trails of muddy water. Of course - the rain would have washed away any tracks. Luckily, however, they don’t come out much during the day. The brightening sky shelters us for now.

 

Three people are asleep, but on a second glance I notice that Raven’s spot is empty, her blanket folded up. It was her turn to keep watch last night, so she must still be upstairs. I creep up to the stairway, careful not to disturb the others.

Raven sits alone on the edge of the roof. Her back is to the stairs, to me, and she is still; All that stirs is the wind catching her dark hair, and the _shik-shik_ sound of a blade being drawn across the concrete floor. She doesn’t turn to me when I sit down beside her.

I close my eyes and let my legs dangle over the edge, focusing on the familiar thrill of having nothing but air under my feet, but I know I won’t fall. The wind drifts by and catches my hair too and I imagine how it looks, Raven’s long, black hair and my dirt-colored, shorter. Familiar sensations, familiar images. I smile.

The sound of the knife stops.

“Gale.”

“Good morning,” I say without opening my eyes. I don’t have to see it to picture her dark eyes turning to me or eyebrow ever so slightly rising. She grunts in response.

“Nothing exciting tonight, then?”

“No,” she sighs. “Nothing. It’s almost disappointing.”

I turn to her and see a half-smile and her hands playing with the knife. Ready for a fight, itching for it. But there hasn't been much lately – no drones, no hummers, not even a stray hunter – and she's getting restless.

“Are the others awake yet?”

I shake my head. Raven stands up with a sigh and stretches her arms.

“Better go wake the others.” She turns to me with that little smile again. “It's moving day.”

“You sure you don't want to sleep before we go?

She shrugs. “I can sleep when we're there.”

“Suit yourself.”

Raven heads for the stairs while I get up and take a last look at the view. Even though we move around often, it never changes much; The landscape of empty buildings and half-razed towers stretches to the horizon wherever you look. Above it all in the distance are the central spires, reaching towards the dark clouds gathered over them. Lightning flashes by as I look and the needle-like towers catch it, absorb it, to turn it into more energy for the Machine.

Raven calls from below and I tear my eyes away from it to follow her.

 

 

“Time to get up, sunshine.”

Jack groans and turns over, doing anything other than getting up.

“Let me try.” Raven walks over, and suddenly Jack is sitting straight up, giving both of us an extremely skeptical glance.

“There we go.” I let myself grin, but Jack remains unamused. She sighs and runs her hands through her tangle of dark hair, trying to undo the night's mess.

Raven undoes her work in an instant by ruffling her hair as soon as she stands up. Jack swats at her but doesn't reach as Raven jumps out of the way laughing.

“I hate all of you,” Jack mutters and drags herself over to the temporary food storage to eat. Raven shakes her head and goes back to packing.

A moment later Blackbird and Robin come inside, carrying buckets of rainwater gathered during the night. Blackbird arches a brow at Jack with an amused smile but says nothing; Robin skips over to her and chirps a _good morning,_ getting a tired mumble in return.

 

The five of us are a family. Not in the literal sense – few of us are related – but that doesn't matter to us. Raven and Jack do look like they could be sisters, at a distance, but Jack's face is rounder where Raven's is all hard angles, her eyes hazel where Raven's is dark, and though she's lanky she's nowhere near Raven's height.

Blackbird and Robin, however, are actual sisters, and it shows; They have the same steel-grey eyes, the same nose and the same smattering of freckles. Though aside from that they're also different; Blackbird's rust-colored hair and mature figure stands out to her sister's dark brown hair and thin, frail-looking body.

And then there's me, in-between them all. I'm a few years younger than Raven and Blackbird, but older than Robin and Jack; I'm not particularly tall or short, and my own green eyes and sand-brown hair aren't much like anyone else's.

We certainly make a picture, but today our plan hinges on not standing out. Not that there'll be anyone to spot us – there haven't been any hunters around in days, and hopefully there won't be anything else to give us trouble - but there's a tension in the air nonetheless, a swarm of unspoken doubts. Everyone's ready to fight.

Everyone eats their share and once we're all up and working we pack up the remainder of our supplies quickly. I grab another piece of chalk to mark our path, in case we get lost or need to double back, and Raven tosses me one of the knives and another to Blackbird. Jack makes one last round around the building to check her traps and returns with a rat that she stows in a spare pot, and with that we leave and make our way through the maze of the city.

 


End file.
